Oriented strand board (OSB) is a wood product formed from layered wafers of wood oriented in a particular pattern. For example, conventional OSB includes top and bottom layers of wood wafers with the longitudinal axes of the wafers aligned substantially parallel to a longitudinal axis of the board. Conventional OSB also includes a central layer disposed between the top and bottom layers with the longitudinal axes of wafers aligned substantially perpendicular to the longitudinal axis of the board.
As part of the OSB manufacturing process, manufacturers utilize waferizing machinery, such as ring strander devices or disk flaker devices to shave logs, such as aspen, yellow pine, or white birch, into thin wafers in a procedure termed waferizing. Taking disk flaker devices as an example, a typical disk flaker device includes a rotating disk and a set of knife assemblies supported by the rotating disk where each knife assembly extends from a center of rotation of the disk to an outer periphery of the disk. Each knife assembly includes a knife blade that extends toward a work piece, such as one or more logs, where a longitudinal axis of each log is substantially parallel to a face of the rotating disk. In such an arrangement, during operation, as the rotating disk rotates about its center of rotation and as the logs advance toward the rotating disk (or as the rotating disk advances toward the logs), the cutting assemblies shaves wood from the logs and a counter knife of each cutting assembly causes the shavings to break into wood wafers having a particular range of widths. These wood wafers are then used in the manufacture of OSB.